1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to global climate impact modeling and mapping and a global climate change adaptation atlas.
2. Description of Related Art
The Earth's climate has changed many times during the planet's history, with events ranging from ice ages to long periods of warmth. Historically, natural factors such as volcanic eruptions, changes in the Earth's orbit, and the amount of energy released from the Sun have been shown to affect the Earth's climate. Also, human activities associated with the Industrial Revolution beginning late in the 18th century have changed the composition of the Earth's atmosphere and are projected to further influence the Earth's climate in various ways.
The extent of climate change impacts upon different ecosystems, regions and sectors of the economy depend not only on the severity and certainty of specific changes, but also on the sensitivity of those systems to climate change and these systems' ability to adapt to climate change and to reduce the negative impacts of such changes on human activities and ecosystem functions.
Climate mitigation is any action taken to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to reduce the potential long-term risk and hazards of climate change. Examples of mitigation include taking actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants, vehicles, and land management practices. Mitigation is a global issue, where emissions reductions anywhere provide benefits everywhere.
Climate adaptation is the process of adjusting to changing environmental conditions that will likely occur even with emissions mitigation efforts. Adaptive practices and outcomes encompass a broad set of activities designed to reduce human and ecosystem vulnerability to climate change. Because climate impacts are spatially diverse and could affect exposed populations and resources around the world very differently, adaptation is an inherently location-specific problem and thus must be targeted and site-specific to be effective. As a result, the geographic location of key impacts, populations, and resources—where, whom, and how hard droughts, storms, or floods will hit—are central to decision making and investment.
Adaptive interventions can range in scale and scope from small installations such as rainwater collection and drip irrigation systems to national investments in dikes and levees to respond to sea level rise.
Adaptation to environmental change is not a new concept. Human societies have shown throughout history a strong capacity for adapting to different climates and environmental changes. For example, farmers, foresters, civil engineers, and their supporting institutions have been forced to adapt to numerous challenges to overcome adversity or to remove important impediments to sustained productivity. An example of an adaptation strategy to prevent damage from climate change is shore protection (e.g., dikes, bulkheads, beach nourishment), which can prevent sea level rise from inundating low-lying coastal property, eroding beaches, or worsen flooding. If the costs or environmental impacts of shore protection are high compared with the property being protected, an alternative adaptation strategy would be a planned retreat, in which structures are relocated inland as shores retreat. Other examples of adaptation and coping strategies with current climate fluctuations include farmers planting different crops at different times of a season, and wildlife migrating to more suitable habitats as the seasons change.
Until recently, interventions like those discussed above were seen as either poverty alleviation development activities or solely as backstop measures in the event that mitigation efforts failed. Now there is growing recognition that reducing vulnerability and building resilience to climate impacts are complementary-not competing-objectives. Despite this shift in awareness, adaptation remains a daunting challenge, requiring coordination at unprecedented scales from the local to global level across nearly all sectors of the economy and all types of ecosystems. In many cases, the countries and regions in greatest need of adaptation measures are the least equipped to develop, manage, and coordinate large-scale programs.
Adaptation to climate change is emerging as a significant policy issue, and a variety of efforts are being advanced to help build resilience to climate impacts around the world. Although new funding mechanisms, such as the UN Adaptation Fund, are expected to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to the problem in the coming decade, there is a growing disconnect between science and policy, and the local impacts of climate change on our food, water, land, health, and livelihood systems are still poorly understood.
The global community is now slowly converging around international and national policy options for mitigation, and in parallel, a variety of large and small-scale funding mechanisms have emerged to spur investment in adaptation. However, the allocation of adaptation funding remains highly controversial, and limited lessons can be drawn from the decades of experience with mitigation policy design that are relevant for adaptation policy and investment. The primary reason for this disconnect is a single fundamental difference between the problems of mitigation and adaptation: location.
Adaptation policy design is a fundamentally spatial problem. Thus, adaptation mapping is a critical prerequisite to decision making, investment, and policy design at multiple scales from the local to the international. The geographic locations of populations, resources, and impacts are central to the decisions being made. Geography is one of the few common threads connecting the science on climate impacts to programs and policies designed to promote adaptation. Therefore, mapping can play a central role in building and maintaining the essential linkages between science, policy, and on-the-ground practice. Because adaptation is both a global and a local problem affecting populations and ecosystems around the world, it is natural that responses will be sector-, site-, and population-specific. Therefore, success depends on real-time coordination of impacts and adaptation activities intended to respond to those impacts.
Science and policy coordination is an essential element of effective adaptation. Without coordination, adaptation programs have the potential to duplicate or undermine one another. For example, rainwater collection projects in warming regions could increase the risk of mosquito breeding and undercut parallel malaria prevention efforts.
Current global climate models are not well suited to evaluate highly localized impacts or adaptation needs. Global assessments have typically been focused on macro-scale trends in natural systems, such as changes in global average temperature or precipitation, making it extremely challenging to assess local climate impacts, especially in developing nations, where there are large gaps in monitoring and baseline research.
The existing body of climate science on human system impacts is very coarse and limited. Scientists around the world, however, are making strides in creating finer-grained regional and local assessments of impacts and integrating these data across multiple sectors ranging from health to water.
Nonetheless, decision-makers at all levels of government have already begun to establish funding mechanisms for adaptation. The largest and most recent of these is the UNFCCC Adaptation Fund. It already holds approximately $50 million dollars (USD), a figure that is expected to grow into the billions over the coming decades. Yet significant disagreement exists about how to set allocation priorities and identify target areas for new investment.
This conflict is not unique: governments, donors, and development practitioners at all levels around the world are making similar decisions about how to address and prioritize climate change within ongoing projects and programs. To date, all of these efforts have largely been driven by current political concerns in the absence of a clear picture of future impacts. Without careful coordination, there is a risk of investing in adaptation measures in one sector that could duplicate or negate investments in another sector both in the short-term and the long-term. For example, new rainwater collection reservoirs in areas affected by climate change could create large pools of standing water in areas more susceptible to breeding of mosquitoes, which in turn could undercut public health interventions targeting outbreaks of malaria or dengue fever, by changing local exposure to mosquito-borne diseases. As a result, stakeholders not only require information on how the local climate is anticipated to change, but also information on what others in the region and around the world are doing in response. Right now, no central clearinghouse exists for this kind of data.
It would therefore be advantageous to compile and map climate impact and adaptation project data to define priorities for adaptation funding and early capacity building efforts, and to strengthen the links between science, policy, and practice.